Meet Retail Customers’ Expectations for Excellence With a Single Voice and a Single Point of Control
New research from The Harris Poll, in a survey commissioned by Redpoint Global, showed a pronounced gap between how marketers and consumers rate the ability of brands to deliver an “excellent” customer experience (CX). While a majority of marketers (51 percent) rated their ability as excellent, just 26 percent of consumers agreed. Consumers rated retailers behind even financial services and healthcare in the ability to provide an excellent CX along the dimensions of privacy, personalization, consistency and customer understanding.
Retailers must work at closing the CX gap to meet customer expectations or face the consequences. In the Harris Poll survey, 39 percent of consumers said that they will not do business with a brand that doesn't offer a personalized CX.
A Consistent Voice and an Omnichannel CX
To do so, retailers must understand precisely who customers are and what they want. An omnichannel customer experience meets lofty customer expectations for excellence by delivering consistent relevance across all digital and physical touchpoints, and always within the context of a dynamic, individual customer journey.
A holistic experience manifests itself as if the brand is communicating with the customer via one voice, independent of channel or department. From the customer’s standpoint, the experience all too often appears fragmented or uneven across these dimensions. If brands appear to operate in silos in any way, it's at the detriment of the overarching relationship a brand builds with a customer.
First-Party Data and the Value Exchange
At the core, customers want to feel understood and valued. The relationship strengthens when a customer on the receiving end of an omnichannel CX willingly provides first-party data in exchange and trusts that the brand will use it in accordance with the customer’s privacy and transparency preferences to further enhance a personalized experience marked by consistent relevance.
This trust is underpinned by brands having a high quality and precise view of first-party data, a view that's only made possible with a modern architecture that can overcome the complex, overlapping and fragmented nature of each enterprise’s marketing technology stack.
A Single Point of Control
These complicated technology stacks are now hindering brands’ ability to meet retail customers’ expectations for personalization. Without a single view of the customer, and without a single platform, there can be no consistent voice that engages with the customer holistically across all digital and physical channels. Too often, friction is introduced into a customer journey, and as we’ve seen customers won't tolerate an impersonal, fractured or disjointed experience with a brand.
A modern architecture that delivers a consistent omnichannel experience can leave point solutions in place yet form a single point of operational control over data, decisions and actions.
When first-party data is collected from every source, in real time, and data quality is automated at the point of ingestion, the result is a unified customer profile (i.e., a golden record) that a brand can trust accurately represents an individual customer or entity (e.g., household, business, etc.). Accounting for every conceivable device, address, ID, relationship, etc., across both known and unknown customer journeys, a golden record lets a brand know everything there is to know about a customer. With this single customer view, decisions powered by machine learning and intelligently orchestrated in the context of an individual journey are always pitch-perfect for a customer, optimized to drive any intended outcome.
A single point of operational control provides brands with a true customer-centric framework that, to the customer, appears as a single, trusted voice communicating with them throughout every interaction. That is an omnichannel customer experience that drives revenue from satisfied, loyal customers.
John Nash is the chief marketing and strategy officer at Redpoint Global, a customer data platform and engagement hub.
John Nash is chief marketing and strategy officer at Redpoint Global. He has spent his career helping businesses grow revenue by applying advanced technologies, analytics, and business model innovations. In his role at Redpoint Global, John is responsible for developing new markets, launching new solutions, building brand awareness, generating pipeline growth, and advancing thought leadership.
